Ethnicity: The Shell that Needs Shedding

It is sad that in 2017, I find myself still waiting for the realization of what Apostle Paul declared in Galatians 3:28, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” The full force of the issue of ethnicity within a church context took hold of me after I got ordained as a priest. As long as I was in the pews, it was a great advantage to be “different,” to be “ethnic.” People flocked to welcome and help me as I worshiped in churches that were largely “white.” It was an altogether different story when it came to my leadership as a first-generation immigrant, woman of color interviewing for clergy positions in the predominantly white Episcopal Church. It didn’t help to have a strange sounding name at the top of my resume. There was even a suggestion to change my name into an English/biblical name to make it easier for me to find a call, but how can I betray myself in such a manner?

I have had my fair share of ranting and raving about racism and sexism. Today, I look at it as a God-given opportunity of opening people’s minds to the leadership of the other, to make visible that it is God’s prerogative to raise up any person or people to ministry to His Body. To be the first woman priest and/or the first woman of color called to serve the four churches I was at, and now my fifth one as the first woman of color to serve/lead this almost all-white congregation is, I believe, God’s own doing. The Holy Spirit needed to do some difficult work in me to arrive at this place of seeing myself first as a child of God before anything else, to be able to hold lightly to my ethnicity, and gender too, in a church where there are people who do not receive holy communion from me because I am a woman.

Living at a time of such rapid changes in every sphere of life, at a time when the world appears to have become a global village, it’s utterly surprising to be caught up in this current rise of emotional energy feeding the nationalism/tribalism and many other isms that separate us. With such unrestrained protectionist rhetoric popping up everywhere I ask myself, would it heal my experiences of discrimination over the years to be defensive about my ethnicity in the places where I am sent to serve? When I am called to serve the Body of Christ from a place of vulnerable hospitality, where is the space to safeguard my ethnicity? What is ethnicity after all? Isn’t it what I find myself becoming acutely aware of mostly within the imagination that I am seen as less than the other? Why should I allow myself to be defined by outside agencies with a stunted vision of God’s creative force that is still in the process of shaping me?

This is what it means to me to embrace the life Jesus comes offering, that I am enabled to peel away daily every identity, of which there are many, that the world has labeled on me, that I too have displayed depending on how it portrayed me better than others. I now long for the day when nothing matters except that Jesus recognizes me as His friend and I recognize Him in every person that I encounter.

Ajung Sojwal is the Interim Rector at Trinity Episcopal Church, Tariffville,CT. She lives with her husband in Tariffville, CT.